Leveling and Other Tips

When leveling mining, it pays to think ahead. Though Blizzard has made some changes to make leveling easier, there's at least one you can do to make it feel like it's easier on yourself. This starts when you start mining. It's much easier to level smelting ore than actually mining it. It's more annoying to find a copper node and not get a skill up than to be making yourself a cup of tea while you smelt 60 ore and miss a few skill-ups. Since smelting really only tracks with actual node skill-ups at the level of copper it pays to take advantage of it. When you first start mining, don't smelt any of your ore. Bank it, send it to an alt, whatever you need to do to get it out of your bag. Just don't smelt it and don't sell it.

When you get to a mining skill of about 40, now is the time to smelt. Gather all of your ore from wherever you've stashed it and then go make yourself a sandwich while you smelt it all. This should get you easily into tin, possibly even giving you a nice jump.

From this point on, though, note that when mining a node may be green or even yellow but smelting will no longer give you a skill-up. While smelting can give a skill-up (and it's worth it to take the skill-up over the added value from the Auction House any day) sometimes it won't. In these cas House for the prices of both ore and smelted bars to see which are selling for more. Jewelcrafters want ore (except for silver, truesilver and gold) for prospecting gems so sometimes those will sell for significantly more than the smelted bars. But sometimes the bars do sell for more. This fluctuates both depending on what server you're on as well as what the market is doing. Which means while smelted bars sold for more last weekend, this weekend you can't give them away. It's worth it to check frequently as the price gap can be significant.

The following table shows you the progression of ores and what level you need to be to mine them as well as learn to smelt them: